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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

What Does It Take To Be Runner Up for Time’s Person of the Year Award? Tim Cook Knows

A lot of people, Apple fans or not, grieved the death of Steve Jobs on October 5, 2011. Tim Cook, took over the reigns at Apple, but there was a lot of doubt if the company will ever be the same without Jobs. Though there was concern over Cook’s competence and strategy, it seems that concern has been washed away as Apple released product after product. Though some releases faced challenges, consumers still lined up outside Apple stores. And it doesn’t hurt that Time Inc. named Cook the runner up for their Person of the Year award, coming up just short of US President Barack Obama – and honestly, coming second to Obama is still a big deal.

But what did Cook actually do to deserve the second highest honor?

Great Personality

Cook is not known for being an extrovert; he likes to take charge but not with the spotlight on him. So when he took the stage to introduce the iPhone 4S last year, people were a bit underwhelmed, and of course compared him to Jobs ,who was a great showman. But as Time describes, Cook is perfect just the way he is.

“[L]ike an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple,” Time’s description of Cook. “Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.”

Humble

Though he wasn’t as hands on like when he served as Apple’s chief operating officer, thus the Maps kerfuffle, he knew when to admit mistakes and acknowledge other’s great feats – such as advising people to use Google Maps, or any other good navigation app or service for that matter. He apologized for the whole Maps debacle, promising that they’re doing everything to smooth out their Maps app for a better user experience.

Make peace, not war – almost

Jobs’ dying wish was to bring down the wrath of the gods against Google for the Android platform and other companies he said copied or infringed their products and technology, resulting in a string of patent infringement cases against rival tech companies such as Samsung, HTC, and Motorola. Though Cook is still breathing down hard against Samsung, they managed to play nice with HTC and entered into a licensing deal with the company. Though it portrayed Cook as becoming too much of a softie, this just means Apple’s open to ending all patent brawls in exchange for a licensing fee. It’s a win-win situation, actually.

Those are just some of Cook’s special features, and I’m sure he has a lot of them. I know there a lot of anti-Apple people out there, but you can’t hate Cook for doing exceptionally well despite the constant questioning of whether or not he really is fit for the job. As they say, haters gonna hate, you just have to ignore them and live your life knowing that you did well.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.